Society of Indiana Archivists Preconference

My Day

I had a marvelous time presenting the 2014 Preconference Workshop for the Society of Indiana Archivists at the Indiana State Library this afternoon with my dear friend and colleague Amanda Starkel, the Information Commons and eLearning Librarian at Butler University. The topic of our presentation was Wikipedia for Archivists and covered the basics of Wikipedia editing, licensing, and community standards for GLAM professionals. The LibGuide from which we presented can be found at Butler LibGuides and includes dozens of resources for the beginning information professional Wikipedian.

Friday Link Round-Up

Workshop preparation left me little time for keeping up with my favorite RSS feeds this week, so I spent a lovely and quiet Friday night catching up.

Libraries

Vatican Library to Go Digital - 1.5 million pages being contracted out to NTT Data out of Japan.

Mysterious coded messages at university library: Professor Mike Moffatt at Western University and university librarians have discovered 16 coded messages in various books around the library. The code has yet to be broken!

Burned Paper Nails Tutorial (via Boing Boing): Something fun for the next Banned Books Week. (This year’s celebration will be September 21-27)

Technology

Unless companies pay, their Facebook updates reach 6 percent of followers: We’ve had a lot of trouble with this at the library - engagement has been much more successful on Twitter!

MetaPhone: The Sensitivity of Telephone Metadata - Interesting research out of Stanford demonstrating how telephone metadata can contain personally identifiable information.

Bring Back Forum, Recipe, Local, and More to Google Search - Also search for blogs and patents with these URL strings. I remember finding recipe search useful when we were doing “Recipe Roulette” in Perspectives on Information.

The Best Tools and Apps to Make the Most of Flickr - From editing to uploading to curation, these tools and applications improve the Flickr experience. Don’t forget to check out the comments for more suggestions. One notable omission: TinEye Multicolr Search.

Habit List - Combining a traditional to-do list with the Seinfeld Productivity Method (“don’t break the chain,”) this beautifully-designed iOS app is quite unique in the ecosystem of to-do apps. $2.99 in the App Store.

Art

Zack Seckler: Aerial Abstracts (via Miss Moss) - Beautiful aerial photographs of flora and fauna in Botswana.

[]’Nevermore’ Forevermore: Bringing Edgar Allan Poe Back to Boston] (via My Modern Met) - Statue of Edgar Allen Poe by Stefanie Rocknack. See initial carving in wood at her site.

The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation - Review of the graphic novel by Cory Doctorow. [http://amzn.com/0061969761]

5 days of TED in one page (via Boing Boing) - I have some mixed feelings about TED as an organization, but I always find their talks interesting. This is a nice infographic from a participant in the TED Big Bang 2014, summarizing her feelings about the event.

News

AT&T to Netflix: if you don’t bribe us to do our job, you’re asking for a “free lunch” - The net neutrality discussion continues to provoke facepalm moments. I like the AT&T Death Star illustration; huzzah for CC BY!

Crowdfunding Novena, the fully open/transparent laptop project - The Internet is abuzz over this open source hardware project. Launched on Crowd Supply, the project is half-funded with 44 days left to go.

History

400,000 Stars (via Boing Boing) - The story of the “women who worked as human computers at Harvard’s observatory” from new-to-me podcast The Memory Palace. Looking forward to making my way through their archives! (Favorite podcast app for iOS, by the way, is Pocket Casts, a universal app well worth the $3.99 price tag, also available for Android)